Tag Archives: Scotland

Kewakawa, New Zealand I’d seen a positive review of Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain’s Underclass by Darren McGarvey, so I put it on my list for vacation reading. My interest was particularly piqued because he was focusing on Glasgow, Scotland, where our organizing is making strong progress, and I had recently spent time with Sean Bailie, our organizer there.

It was an interesting book, though not what I might have expected or hoped to read. There were flashes of real insight.

Here’s McGarvey on gentrification:

“The term ‘gentrification’ simply means people with more money than you, but not more money than people with money, are being invited to set up shop in your area on the cheap, in the hope that their presence will lift you a little out of the gutter.”

Here’s another a couple of pages later that amplifies his points:

“It’s an understatement to say that many have become angry, disillusioned or apathetic after years of feeling ignored, dismissed and bullied by agencies and institutions speaking in the medical jargon of regeneration. There’s a feeling in sections of these communities, among those who want to actively participate, that things are not done with the community but to it.”

McGarvey is also excellent in his critique of the “poverty industry” and its self-interest trumping any concern for the community. He’s “right on” when he talks about the need for responding to the “voice” of the community and listening to what people who live in the housing estates and neighborhoods like his own Pollack. Reading his sympathetic case stories about the organizational struggles to protect the area are a tale of good, active work, and his respect for the organizers is palpable. In short, there’s enough in the book that makes it worth the read and every time he runs into the swamp, usually dry land isn’t far away.

At the same time the book is troubling. This is a personal story couched in a political one, and invariably the personal story sucks out the rest. The personal story is also one that never finds totally solid ground. McGarvey likes to step forward, but also sidle back enough to protect his ass, to concede the same ground he just took, to claim as quickly that he might be as wrong as he is right. The reader can never be fully sure where he stands.

He defends this as a mixture of personal maturity and growing empathy with other points of view, people, and classes. His personal politics has run from socialist to maybe liberal, but really to nothing for sure anymore. His platform now is Bill Clinton’s. He advocates personal responsibility first and foremost while systemic issues, class, and politics for him has become more a two-handed situation, on the one hand this and on the other that. He is portrayed as being a voice of the working class, but his book never talks about work or workers, their culture or values except when it collides with his personal story. This is a story of “uplift,” as Ibram Kendi called it in Stamped from the Beginning about race. McGarvey wants to be seen as one of the survivors who managed to escape from the muck and mire.

All of which leaves me wondering about what audience the book was written for? Not for me and his fellow Glaswegians for sure despite the parts we might find spot on. It feels written for the folks in the next rung of the ladder he’s climbing, not those of us who would have been glad to hold his ladder steady from the bottom as he looked around and spread the word.

Edinburgh At ACORN, we’ve always said that one of the assets of political campaigns, even in losing, is the ability to test and prove your base, allowing an organization to expand its capacity and measure its support. Never has that been truer that the depth of the engagement of people in Scotland in the wake of the independence vote that though unsuccessful, pulled 85% of the people into participation. Spending a day with organizers and leaders of ACORN Scotland, EPTAG, the Edinburgh Private Tenant Action Group, our first affiliate, and the newly activated members of our first community organization, ACORN Leith, might have skewed my perspective, but even in the aftermath of the vote, it was amazing to hear random people on the street stopping at our Living Rent campaign stall and bringing up the issues and expectations as they joined thousands of others in signing postcards for the campaign which we will present to Parliament in the coming week.

Part of this surge in civic engagement is measurable. Reports of huge membership increases in the Scottish National Party, which drove the campaign for independence, have been documented. A similar wave of new membership has occurred in the Green Party, which also supported the “Yes” campaign. And, remember these were the losers!

Setting up stall with Liz Ely, Jon Black, and Tom Scott

Part of the continuing excitement, and contention, can be found in the ongoing struggles that will now be played out between Scotland and Westminster over the devolution of various powers to Scotland. There were promises made by all of the major United Kingdom parties about increased authority that they would give to Scotland if independence was rejected. For the “Yes” voters, nothing less than the whole loaf will ever be acceptable, so counting the slices being put on the table by London will be a continuing controversy.

In such times, there are always huge organizational opportunities that open in this window, and the Living Rent campaign being driven by EPTAG, ACORN Scotland, and significant allies like the Scottish Union of Students and the Scottish Tenant Farmers’ Association, is a good example of seizing the time. The key demands are for greater tenant security, meaning longer term leases, but the real prize of the campaign is the chance to win some solid measures of rent control. Rents have gone up 17% in recent years in Edinburgh for private tenants, and 50% in Aberdeen, so there’s heat here. Furthermore, there’s real political traction with the Scottish government engaged in its first consultation on rent in 25 years and even the Labour Party calling now for rent control in UK as part of its platform for the upcoming May 2015 elections. We are at the table with our allies on this issue, which explains the card signing in the bitter cold next to the bus stop in Leith for all of us before last night’s meeting. It also explains why our organizers believe the action in Parliament might see us produce up to a 1000 in support of rent control.

lot of interest on the street for rent protection

Crazy? I’m not sure anymore, because it times like these when people from the grassroots up are totally engaged and embracing change, organizers and organizations doing the hard, day to day, grinding work of organizing, can find there’s a wind of movement at their backs that can change normal organizing math into something very different, special, and powerful.

My next stop will be working with ACORN London, but I’m keeping my eyes on Scotland. Something is blowing in the wind, and it’s not just winter coming!